Windows 7 Trades Email and Photo Apps For Downloadable Ones 496
arcticstoat writes "Microsoft has said that it plans to remove a lot of the standard apps from Windows 7 in order to make the new OS 'cleaner.' Among the apps for the chop are Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker, which will no longer be included with the operating system as standard.
Instead, equivalent versions of the apps will be available from Microsoft's Windows Live download service as optional free downloads, much like the new BETA versions of the apps that Windows Live offers today." Meanwhile, jammag writes that "tech pundit Mike Elgan posits that the rushed-to-market Windows 7 — due in 2010, now being beta released this October — may in fact merely be Vista with new packaging.
Re:standard apps? (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, what's a "research" (Score:1, Informative)
Mike Elgan doesn't know what he's talking about. Microsoft has been discussing the significant kernel changes in MinWin for more than a year now. It's a _huge_ technological difference, biggest since 98 ->L xp.
Re:Yes, let's remove the two most-used programs (Score:5, Informative)
Partly right. Microsoft didn't get prosecuted for merely being a monopoly or for bundling apps with their OS. They were prosecuted for abusing their monopoly to force competitors out of the market with unsavory tactics including threatening their own hardware partners. Intel wanted to develop a faster, cleaner Java compiler. Microsoft called a meeting insinuating that they were going to favor AMD in their development if they did. The made sure that their OEMs understood that to keep their OEMs prices, the OEMs would not pre-load Netscape onto their machines, etc.
For Apple to do the same thing, they would have to threaten BestBuy and Fry's that loading Picasa2 would be not tolerated and the like. Also Apple would make it nearly impossible to uninstall Mail or iPhoto. Right now to do that is the same as any other app: delete it. Now you can't fully uninstall QuickTime as some of the basic libraries of QuickTime are used in their Quartz rendering engine. But nothing stops you from using another movie player.
Vista or 7? (Score:2, Informative)
You can call it repackaging if you want, and it may not even be worth an upgrade, but it could work well enough for people to move on from XP. There's a chance, after all Windows 2008 is better than Windows 2003, and mostly because it's more nimble and modular when you install it.
Re:Honestly, what's a "research" (Score:5, Informative)
Except minwin was chopped from Windows 7-- and instead they're going with an 'evolution' of the NT-series Vista kernel.
Re:Yes, let's remove the two most-used programs (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just that they included functionality, but how they went about doing it. MS not only used their power to bully hardware manufacturers (as another comment reply noted), but they also tend to intertwine their apps so thoroughly with the OS that even a savvy user would have a hard time removing them.
Apple ships OSX with a web browser and a mail client, but if you never want to see them again, it's a simple matter of going into your apps folder and dragging them to the garbage. During the MS anti-trust mess, there was lots of back and forth about whether or not IE could be unbundled from Windows without making the OS inoperable.
I don't really care what sort of stuff MS decides to ship with windows, as long as it's no harder to remove than any other piece of software, and as long as the OS doesn't repeatedly pester me about reinstalling or switching back to the original MS stuff.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Honestly, what's a "research" (Score:3, Informative)
NT6 *IS* MinWin. Why is it so hard to understand??
http://shippingseven.blogspot.com/2008/05/windows-7-wont-have-compact-minwin.html
Re:As long... (Score:3, Informative)
I've only known one non-geek person who doesn't use webmail; and he's in his fifties. Everyone else I know in the non-geek crowd uses Yahoo or doesn't use the internet at all.
Re:Honestly, what's a "research" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:standard apps? (Score:5, Informative)
Not only did this ship with XP, as others have noted, but you couldn't remove it.
Well, actually you can, but you have to fiddle with some obscure (and hidden) inf file in order to do so.
As i'm a really nice guy, i found a ms kb about it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223182 [microsoft.com]
Talk about informative (nudge, nudge)...
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Informative)
Windows NT shipped as Windows NT with versions 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, and 4.0. Windows 2000 would actually say "Windows NT (Version 5.0.xxxx)" in response to the VER command. Windows XP, prior to Service Pack 1, would also say "Windows NT (Version 5.1.xxxx)". XP's VER command now says it's XP, but we know what's really in there.
One could argue that Windows NT 2.0 was sold as OS/2; the low-level APIs are very similar in semantics, though the names and calling convention are different between OS/2 and NT. And, of course, they pulled the OS/2 GUI and file manager and put the Windows ones on it. This argument is helped by the fact that "OS/2 Warp 3" is versioned as "2.3", and "OS/2 Warp 4" is "2.4". Microsoft got the V3-and-up rights, and IBM kept the V1-and-V2 rights in the OS/2 break-up.
(For a time, NT even included enough stuff to run 16-bit OS/2 programs. *shudder* Maybe it still does, I'm happy to say I haven't seen a 16-bit OS/2 program in 12 years.)
Re:While this may not please some... (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you happen to have a wireless card that isn't based on one of the 4 supported chipsets.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:3, Informative)
3.11 and prior are DOS. ME/98/95..also DOS.
NT started at version 3.1. Don't confuse with windows 3.11/3/2/1.
XP is available in 64 bit, and is a tiny bit cleaner the 2000. Not the huge jump they hyped, but it was an improvement.
For example CD burning was made a lot easier, and USB works a lot better.
Re:While this may not please some... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes, let's remove the two most-used programs (Score:3, Informative)
OSX is a lot like Windows in the web browser aspect. Safari depends on Webkit, and Webkit is closely tied into the operating system. You can certainly delete Safari, just as you can delete iexplore.exe and its associated icons, but in both cases the underlying rendering engine remains on the comuter.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:2, Informative)
And actually, NT 3.51 was a better 'Unix Workstation killer' than NT 4.0. NT4 tried to be the Windows 95 interface. NT 3.51 had the old clunky Program Manager, but it had a much cleaner 'home directory' structure for multiuser systems than NT 4.
If I were running a Windows platform for dedicated applications, I'd choose NT 3.51 over 4.0 anyday. The only reason, ever, to upgrade to 4.0 would be because of apps unsupported on 3.51. That and the crummy Start Menu, I guess.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:3, Informative)
Just a few corrections...
One could argue that Windows NT 2.0 was sold as OS/2; the low-level APIs are very similar in semantics, though the names and calling convention are different between OS/2 and NT. And, of course, they pulled the OS/2 GUI and file manager and put the Windows ones on it.
The OS/2 GUI you speak of, at that time, was the Win3.x style GUI on OS/2 (OS/2 v1.3), retooled for NT from the joint OS/2 code.
This argument is helped by the fact that "OS/2 Warp 3" is versioned as "2.3", and "OS/2 Warp 4" is "2.4". Microsoft got the V3-and-up rights, and IBM kept the V1-and-V2 rights in the OS/2 break-up.
IBM's versioning conventions seem to follow this path...
v1 = MS/IBM joint venture (they both wrote code, IBM fixed MS's so a product could be released)... the numbers corresponded to vX.Z meaning X=version, Z=subversion.
v2 = IBM's OS/2 releases, where much of the MS code was thrown out (and we saw IBM's GUI instead of MS's GUI).
Thus a 2.xz release is 2=IBM, x=version, z=subversion.
It gets a little more odd though... internally (in the code/DLLs/kernel), version numbers are quite different... for instance, you can find stuff like v20.45.?? in version responses from the kernel... meaning (20) IBM release, v4.5, update ??
Microsoft got the V3-and-up rights, and IBM kept the V1-and-V2 rights in the OS/2 break-up.
MS kept the v1.x OS/2 rights. IBM created the v2.x releases. MS and IBM had a technology/code sharing agreement for all the releases. NT started based off the OS/2 v1.x code, and the MS/IBM code that was supposed to have went to OS/2 v2 but didnt due to the split, (and of course other "borrowed" code went into the first version of NT as well).
Oh, and there was a weird release (beta? alpha? rc? early test NT platforms? dont recall which) that co-branded NT and OS/2 in many parts of the Windows code.
And yes, the NT line, to this day, carries over legacy OS/2 1.x code. The XP line still even carries over the early versions of IBM REXX. Sadly (for Windows) all of that code is either 16bit, or been re-ported to 32bit, or some kludge inbetween.
I'm happy to say I haven't seen a 16-bit OS/2 program in 12 years
16bit OS/2 programs are not a problem. NT's OS/2 subsystem (and the one MS originally helped with for the 1.x OS/2 releases) is the problem. Under OS/2, they run just like any other 32bit app. Part of the crap (16bit code handling) that IBM had to rewrite for OS/2 v2.
Until recently, Microsoft's inability to "mix and match" code like that, showed all sorts of performance issues (for the individual code, and/or for the whole OS when running stuff like that). Some of that has been mitigated with the acquisition of Connectix, and the enhancement of those subsystems using Connectix work, and the adding of new subsystems to do similar things (such as WoW - and no, I dont mean World of Warcraft).
Re:Simple test of worthiness - trust me, it works (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with Vista was that it wouldn't run decently on the computers it was being sold on .